The financial engine behind millennial and Gen Z malaise

Younger Americans are now on the hook for $73 trillion in unfunded obligations

- VERONIQUE DE RUGY CONTRIBUTING WRITER

FOR YEARS, pointing out the obvious was considered impolite: America's biggest, most distortionary transfer of wealth does not flow from elites to the working class. Nor does it show up as corporate welfare. It flows from the relatively young and poor to the relatively old and wealthy. It's the defining injustice of our fiscal regime, the largest driver of our government debt and the quiet engine behind the malaise of millennials and Gen Z.

More than a decade ago, Nick Gillespie and I wrote a piece in Reason magazine arguing that Social Security and Medicare had together become the great cause of America's generational inequity. We noted that senior households were wealthier than ever while young households still working to make ends meet had to prop them up further.

We also warned of the threat to a genuine social safety net. Treating every elderly person, no matter how well-off, as a member of a protected class entitled to increasingly unaffordable benefits will eventually destroy a system that progressives in particular cherish.

Around that time, "Occupy Wall Street" protesters were railing against "the 1%." I offered the tongue-in-cheek suggestion that they also consider occupying AARP, the powerful lobby defending the largest intergenerational wealth grab in American history.